Today, human trafficking is a 32-billion dollar industry, and it’s on the rise. And, the reason for that is that individuals who were previously trafficking in arms—and narcotics—are slowly shifting or incorporating the sale of human beings. It truly is modern-day slavery. The task force was launched formally in 2006. Initially there was kind of shock, that, “Why is there a human trafficking initiative here? This is the heart of America. This is part of the Bible Belt. There’s not going to be human trafficking problem in the midwest.” And then, sure enough, one by one, the cases started coming up. We prosecuted more cases in Kansas City than anywhere in the nation. The first few cases that we prosecuted were so, so shocking to our community. The China Rose case was a case involving Asian massage parlors. They would recruit young, primarily Chinese women. They thought they were coming to the United States to work in more of a white-collar field as secretaries, or something more professional. When they smuggled the women into the country, instead of placing them in office environments, they placed them in massage parlors.

One of the most disturbing things about human trafficking is the fact that it happens in areas not just in the worst parts of the city, but it also happens in fancy hotels, and in upscale and upper-class areas right under everyone’s noses. Human trafficking largely falls into two categories, forced labor trafficking and commercial sex trafficking. Forced labor trafficking has no commercial sex component. A lot of the time these are individuals who have been lured into the United States at the promise of a better life—either smuggled in illegally or brought in on fraudulent visas—and then they’re lured into a labor scheme that they can’t get out of. They said if we complain, they’re going to send us back to the Philippines. They always used that word to scare us—“send us back.” I was working so hard to pay my debt. We were trapped in that agency. I think there was no way out. Despite the fact that we’re here in the midwest in Kansas City, Missouri, we’ve investigated and prosecuted the full range of cases. So we haven’t just done commercial sex trafficking or just done forced labor.

We haven’t just had domestic victims; we’ve also had international victims. Once we started getting cases and it was shocking to the community and we got a lot of publicity— Something very interesting happened as far as the media’s role. What they did was educate the public that there was a problem here. And by the end of when I left in 2013, most of our leads in our cases were in fact coming in from the public who had now been educated about what human trafficking was. It’s a crime that really lives in the shadows. Traffickers know how to hide it. They know how to coerce their victims to stay hidden.

And, I think that’s one of the most, um, disturbing and frightening things for the public to realize—that such a horrifying offense, modern-day slavery—can be happening within, um, kind of the fabric of the community..